Beauty in the Brokenness- Christian Women (Bible Study, Faith, Sexuality, Freedom from Shame)

Psalm 142: Permission to Grieve

• Teresa Whiting • Episode 140

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What if the healing you’ve been missing isn’t more willpower or distraction, but a language you were never taught?  We open the door to lament - honest, raw prayer that tells the truth about pain - and trace a simple, courageous path through Psalm 142 that anyone can start today.

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Teresa Whiting:

So many times when I talk to women about the griefs in their lives and I ask them, have you ever fully grieved that or have you ever expressed the pain of that? It's almost like it doesn't even occur to people, like, oh, I can do that. I thought I just had to get over it. I thought I just had to be done with this. But if we skip this important step, this important process of lament, we're leaving this gap or this hole in our healing. Hi, friend. If you've ever wondered how God's word connects with the messy, broken parts of your story, you're in the right place. Welcome to Beauty in the Brokenness, where we have honest conversations about the Bible, our real life struggles, and the hope God brings for healing. I'm your host, Teresa Whiting, an author, Bible teacher, and trauma-informed life coach, but mostly a friend and fellow struggler. No matter who you are or where you've been, I'm inviting you to encounter the God who is still creating beauty right in the midst of your brokenness. We've been talking through some really hard stories in this series. Tamar's story of being raped and silenced and ignored. Then we spoke with Lisa Saruga about her story of rape and injustice. Last week we heard from Darina Lazzo Gilmore Young about her story of grief and widowhood. So here's my question to you. Because likely you're carrying some kind of grief or heartache of your own. What do you do when life is cruel and unfair? When grief and pain threaten to swallow you whole? Here are some potential ideas. See if you recognize any of these. I'm just gonna buck up. This is life. I'm gonna move on and get through this. I'm gonna stay so busy, I don't need to worry about it. I can't do this on my own. I need a therapist. P.S. I'm all for therapy and counseling. I just need a glass of wine to take the edge off. I need to numb out, scroll my phone, watch Netflix, just do something so that I can be distracted. Today I'd like to provide an alternative for those ideas. And it's not the first thing that usually comes to mind. But we need to lament. We are not left to fend for ourselves. God is with us, carrying us, inviting us to cry out to Him in the midst of our pain. He has given us a language for grief that most of us don't know how to speak. So we do all or some of the things I just mentioned. We stuff our grief, we power through it, we get crushed by it, we get paralyzed by it. Some even go as far as to end their lives. But God has provided us a beautiful gift to process our pain. And it's called lament. What exactly is lament? Because it sounds like an outdated word that is something we don't typically do anymore. The way I like to define it is lament is a powerful yet unfamiliar language of honest, raw prayer that gives voice to our pain and opens the door to healing. We see this all through scripture. We see it in the book of Lamentations. The whole entire book is a lament. We see it in the book of Job, in the prophets, in the Psalms. Do you know more than one-third of the Psalms are lament? The Psalms are the songbook of Israel. They were meant to sing these songs of lament together. And Tamar gives us a beautiful model for lament. In 2 Samuel 13, verses 17 to 19, right after she's raped by Amnon, this is what happens. He called his personal servant and said, Get this woman out of my sight and bolt the door after her. Interestingly, in Hebrew, he doesn't even give her the dignity of saying woman. The literal translation is, Get this out of here and bolt the door after her. So his servant put her out and bolted the door after her. She was wearing an ornate robe, for this was the kind of garment the virgin daughters of the king wore. Tamar put ashes on her head and tore the ornate robe she was wearing. She put her hands on her head and went away, weeping aloud as she went. Tamar was lamenting. This is such a common scene in the Bible. The tearing of the clothes, the ashes on the head, the weeping aloud. These are marks of grief and shame, and there's nothing quiet or private about it. She had been violated and she wasn't holding back. And like Tamar, you and I need to learn to lament. I feel like it's the missing ingredient in our healing. So many times when I talk to women about the griefs in their lives and I ask them, have you ever fully grieved that or have you ever expressed the pain of that? It's almost like it doesn't even occur to people, like, oh, I can do that. I thought I just had to get over it. I thought I just had to be done with this. But if we skip this important step, this important process of lament, we're leaving this gap or this hole in our healing. And there's four movements of lament. Now I know I've spoken about this on other podcast episodes, and I'll link those here in case you want to hear more about lament. But today we're going to work through a psalm of lament, and that is Psalm 142. But first, let's talk about the different movements in lament. There's four things that make lament distinct: turning to God, bringing our complaint, asking boldly, and choosing to trust. So when we turn to God, we're coming to him honestly and openly with our pain. We are invited to bring our complaint to him, to voice our sorrow, our frustration, our confusion. In our Bible study last week, there was a woman who said, I love the Psalms because they're so honest. I read them and I'm like, oh, we can say that to God? Yes, yes, we can come with all of our raw emotions and pour it out to him. He can handle it. The third movement is asking boldly. That's where we ask for help. Like, name it. God, I need you to do something. And then fourth is choosing to trust. That's where we are clinging to God's character and his promises. That yes, this hurts, but God, I'm holding on to you. So we're going to look at these as they're seen in Psalm 142. So I'm going to read that Psalm in the English Standard Version. With my voice, I cry out to the Lord. With my voice, I plead for mercy to the Lord. I pour out my complaint before him. I tell my trouble before him. When my spirit faints within me, you know my way. In the path where I walk, they've hidden a trap for me. Look to the right and see. There is none who takes notice of me. No refuge remains to me. No one cares for my soul. I cry to you, O Lord, I say, You are my refuge, my portion in the land of the living. Attend to my cry, for I am brought very low. Deliver me from my persecutors. They're too strong for me. Bring me out of prison, that I may give thanks to your name. The righteous will surround me, for you will deal bountifully with me. So as the Psalm opens, we see movements one and two intertwined. And let me just say this: lament, just like grief, it's not linear. It's not step one, two, three, four, check the boxes, done. No, we move in and out of these stages, out of these movements. They're fluid and they overlap. So we see in verses one and two, David turning to God and bringing his complaint at the same time. What I love is he says, I'm crying out to the Lord. I'm pleading for mercy to the Lord. The Lord is the word Yahweh. It is the personal name for the God of Israel. This is not some distant, aloof deity. This is David saying, You're my God, and I'm crying out to you because I know you and I know that you know me. And he says, I pour out my complaint. I tell my trouble. He says, I cry out to you, Lord. We have permission to get loud with our lament, to speak it, to cry it, to pound the floor. I like to do this kind of thing in the shower, sometimes on my knees, sometimes I'm like hitting the floor for real. And just crying out to God in complaint or telling him that Lord, this is what's going on. Don't you see this? Don't you know this? The second movement is that bringing of complaint. So what exactly is David bringing to the Lord? Well, the words are complaint and trouble. So that word complaint means my deep thoughts and contemplations. And the word trouble can refer to distress, affliction, adversity, anguish. Now you might be thinking, wait, I thought we're not supposed to complain. What about Philippians 2.14, which tells us to do all things without complaining or arguing? Well, we need to take into account the whole counsel of scripture. There's a difference between running toward God in our pain and complaining and defiance and rebellion. It's all about our heart posture. You think about the Israelites when they were complaining about God, they weren't crying out to him in a heart posture of submission and humility. They were angry and they were complaining at like to God, like who he is and criticizing him. So we are allowed to bring our complaint to God when it comes from a heart posture of need and of desperation. When we read the book of Job, he pours out his complaint to God. He says, Therefore, I will not keep silent, I will speak out in the anguish of my spirit, I will complain in the bitterness of my soul. And in the end of the book of Job, God says, when he's talking to one of Job's friends, You have not spoken rightly about me as my servant Job has. God allows us, even encourages us to bring our complaint to him in lament. Now, in verses three and four, we see the specific complaints. He's saying, My spirit faints within me. They've hidden a trap for me. Look to the right and see there's none who takes notice of me. No refuge remains to my soul. The idea here is I am completely overwhelmed. I'm covered with deep distress. And when he says, look to my right, the right hand was traditionally considered a hand of authority, of power, of support and strength. And David's like, I'm looking to my right and I've got nobody. No one cares. No one notices. I am on my own in this. One of the hardest things for us to feel in our pain is isolation, is loneliness. That just compounds our grief when we feel like I'm hurting and I'm all alone. The third movement is to ask boldly. We come to God and we cry out for help, for justice, for healing. So in this passage, what words are a direct ask? Well, we see in verse one, I plead for mercy. Verse four, look to the right and see. Verse six, attend to my cry, deliver me, bring me out of prison. We might hear those words that they're very specific, and we might think, well, I don't, I don't have people persecuting me, or I'm not in a literal prison. But I think sometimes our grief, our fear, our anxiety, they can persecute us and they can be just as terrible as a literal prison. And now our direct asks might not sound as formal. We don't typically come to God saying, attend to my cry, right? Our our lament might be a little more raw. Like, God, do something, silence those lies, heal my broken heart, bring justice to the situation, expose the truth, fix this. God wants us to ask boldly. And then the fourth movement is choosing to trust. That's where we cling to God's character and his promises. It's an important element of lament when we say, I don't get it, and I trust you. I don't like it. And you are still good. This hurts. And I will praise you in the midst of my pain. Now, as I mentioned, my favorite place to lament is in the shower. You know, something there's something about that hot water, it hits and it's just it lets the tears flow. And sometimes when I'm there, I will sing out loud, like it's not a pretty sound, trust me. Um, and I only do this when nobody's home. But that to me is an expression of trust. So what are some of the words in this psalm that indicate trust? Verse five says, I say, You are my refuge, my portion in the land of the living. Verse 7 says, The righteous will surround me, for you will deal bountifully with me. And when we look at some of those words, that word refuge means shelter, protection, my safe place, my hope. Now, the word portion, that's not a word we typically use in our culture, unless we're talking about food. But in Hebrew, the word is kalech, and it reflects themes of God's sovereignty and faithfulness. It was often used in the distribution of land and blessings, as seen as an act of God's will. We see him as the ultimate provider and sustainer. But I'm just gonna give you like the Teresa definition. When the psalmist says, God, you are my portion, he's saying, God, you are all I've got and you are enough. I don't have protection, I don't have friends, I'm afraid, I'm sad, I'm angry, and you are my portion, I have you, and I have enough. And then the psalm ends with this phrase, you will deal bountifully with me. In other words, you will show your goodness to me. I believe that you are generous, that you are gonna adequately supply my needs, even in the midst of this painful life circumstance. So if I were to summarize Psalm 142, this Psalm of Lament, I would say, basically, the psalmist is saying, Life hurts, I'm alone with no one to count on, I'm being attacked and I'm in it and I'm in danger. So I'm gonna cry out to God. I'm gonna bring my complaint, I'm gonna spill it all before you, and then I'm gonna rest in the fact that you are enough. You're my refuge, you're my safe place. Sometimes we don't have the words, and we can borrow them from scripture. We can take a psalm, we can take a passage from lamentation or the words of Job, and we can pray it back to God. So those are the four movements of lament, but there's one more aspect of lament that I want to mention, and that is the power of community, of being seen in our lament. I think one of the most tragic parts of Tamar's story is that she was silenced by Absalom. You know, he comes, he comforts her, and then he's like, let's not talk about this. That was not a good way for her to be handled. And when we see one another in grief, in pain, it's uncomfortable, right? We feel weird, we kind of feel squirmy and squirrely, and we're like, ah, I just want to make the person feel better because we're not used to this. It's a new language. We've got to learn to do it, but we need to learn to do this together. Of course, there are times when you are gonna lament by yourself, in the shower, on the floor in your bedroom. Yes. But also, we need to make spaces where we can do this together. Out of the 58 Psalms of lament in scripture, 16 of them are communal. So God expects us to grieve together. I think about how other cultures do this so well. They have a community of people that come and they grieve and they weep together. That's not common here. But we can change that. We can learn to lament with one another. So I want to ask you: do you have a space for this? Do you have a safe person that you feel like, yeah, you know what? I can come to this person and I can lament with them. I'm not on my own. Or I have this group of women, or I have somebody in my life that is a place where I can lament. One of the things I desire to do is to create those safe spaces for you. My friend Brenda Stewart is a licensed therapist, and she and I work together. We have created some workshops called Lament Workshops. And I think Brenda has such a gift of this gentle and skillful way of helping people navigate their grief. She has walked her own journey of grief, and um, she knows so well how to create a safe community of witnesses that affirm and honor each other's pain. So we have these lament workshops where you can identify your common symptoms of grief and loss. You know, sometimes when we're in the midst of grief, we kind of feel a little crazy, like, what's wrong with me? Why am I not getting through this? Or, or even just thought patterns and we wonder, like, is this normal? Yes, I'm telling you, she normalizes the grief, the things that are common in grief. We write our own psalm of lament. We practice embodied techniques for processing grief that we can use every day. And we allow our grief to move through us. Not, we don't get over it, we don't just push past it or power past it. We make space to move through it so that we can heal fully and completely. Now, little caveat here. We're not going to be fully 100% healed this side of heaven, but we can take steps. We can get to a better place than we are today. So I want to encourage you, if you have never learned to lament, think about these reasons why lament is so important. It helps us live more whole, honest lives, making space for both our joy and our grief. It gives voice to your painful emotions, emotions that God created, that He can handle, that He welcomes. It gives you permission. You are invited to share those hard feelings with the Lord. And on that holy path to healing, when you name your pain and release it to God, you will find Him present right in the midst of it. You will learn to live fully, embracing both the brokenness and the beauty of your story. Through the gift of lament, you'll begin to mend the whole in your healing. I want to pray Psalm 142 over us. I've kind of turned it into a communal lament. So if you would, put your hand on your heart and identify what you need to lament. And I invite you to pray this psalm with me. With our voices, we cry out to you, O Lord. With our voices, we plead for your mercy. We pour out our complaint before you. We tell you all our trouble. When our spirits grow faint within us, you know our way. In the path where we walk, they've hidden a trap for us. Look to the right and see, there is no one who notices us. No refuge remains to us. No one cares for our souls. We cry to you, O Lord. We say, You are our refuge, our portion in the land of the living. Attend to our cry, for we are brought very low. Deliver us from our persecutors, for they are too strong for us. Bring us out of prison, that we may give thanks to your name. The righteous will surround us, for you are. Will deal bountifully with us. Thanks for hanging out with me today on Beauty and the Brokenness. To find anything I mentioned on the episode, go to TeresaWiting.com slash episode dash one forty to find all the show notes. In closing, I want to leave you with this prayer from number six, twenty four to twenty six. The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you. The Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace.